The microelectronic industry is continually striving to produce ever faster and smaller microelectronic devices for use in various mobile electronic products, such as portable computers, electronic tablets, cellular phones, digital cameras, and the like. As these goals are achieved, the size of attachment structures, such as microelectronic interconnects for the microelectronic devices, and the space or pitch between these attachment structures becomes smaller. The smaller size and pitch of the attachment structures makes them more susceptible to damage from fabrication processes, which may result in reliability issues and yield loss for the microelectronic devices. Thus, there is a continual effort to improve these processes.